Altus Press - Highly Recommended

[Calenorn]

If you enjoy the serial adventure stories from the pulp era, try visiting Altus Press:

http://www.altuspress.com/

Altus is mining two rich sources: stories that were printed in The Argosy magazine, and the writings (both novels and magazine serials) of H. Bedford-Jones.

All the classic pulp genres are represented: Westerns, Sword and Planet yarns, casebooks of Detectives and G-Men, Mysteries, Aviation, Science Fiction, War, Espionage, Horror, you name it! There’s even a collection of Spicy Mysteries you can hide under the mattress.

There are high adventure stories ranging from darkest Africa to the Canadian northwest. There are historical adventures for a bit of the old hack-and-slash. And there are even a few lost world tales to bring them together.

Altus’ forte is collecting all the stories for a single protagonist in one volume. These seem to be produced as softcovers first, so a few of the titles are not yet available as ebooks. However, the softcover book prices seem reasonable, and they offer free shipping on the softcovers.

While everyone knows Zorro and The Shadow, Altus gives us the opportunity to meet some of the lesser lights in the pulp universe. You’d best not cross swords with Senorita Scorpion! And I wouldn’t cross Armless O'Neil at all! But you can rest assured when Captain Zero or The Black Bat are on the case. Also, who wouldn’t be mystified by Diamondstone, Magician-Sleuth?

Wandering the aisles of Altus, you might be surprised to encounter some familiar authors. Here we have Lester Dent, Johnston McCulley, and Henry Kuttner. Also here’s Arthur Leo Zagat writing about a dystopian future long before that was cool.

Matt Moring and the Altus Press team are preserving pulp’s glorious past by supporting pulp scholarship. (Yes, that is a THING.) The sell pulp histories, chronologies of pulp heroes, and biographies of pulp authors. Their site also has a nifty pulp superhero index; here’s a representative page:

http://www.altuspress.com/the-ultima...rhero-index/t/

Titles available via the Altus site are hyperlinked.

Pulp adventure fiction has a future as well as a past. The Altus site links to some new pastiche novels written by Will Murray. There are over a dozen fresh adventures for Doc Savage, and one for Tarzan!

Most of the Altus ebooks are priced at $4.99 right now. I bought a couple of these, and they are very nicely produced. They are not crude OCR scans; since Altus was preparing the files for paper printing, the ebooks are very well edited.

From their own site Altus sells their ebooks without DRM; look for a download link on the sales confirmation page.

There’s so much quality public domain material to read that I don’t spend much on ebooks these days. The Jules Verne alone would take the rest of my life! But I’m very happy with my purchases from Altus, and I will buy again from them in the future.

The FUTURE…. Hmmm.